


Damage Control

by Kirstein_and_Arlert



Category: Marvel 616
Genre: Gen, PTSD
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-04-14
Updated: 2013-04-14
Packaged: 2017-12-08 13:06:26
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 517
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/761635
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kirstein_and_Arlert/pseuds/Kirstein_and_Arlert
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Maria thinks that she used to dream; now she just has nightmares.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Damage Control

Maria once said, “I can’t shake him,” and it wasn’t a lie. He’s in her head, and he won’t leave. Everything that she saw, everything that she thought about when that disc entered her neck, it’s still there. Swirling around inside her mind, knocking at the door she keeps locked at all times.

Until she falls asleep. Then the door opens.

Maria is a failure.

(They were right, they were all right)

Maria is everything her father said she was; the girl who killed her own mother, the girl who couldn’t listen, the girl who would never amount to anything. She is everything her colleagues said she was; the woman who wasn’t good enough, who the other agents had looked down their noses at since day one (too inexperienced, too military, too young, too weak, too _female_ ).

She is everything they told her she was, everything they expected her to be.

(Maria is everything she fears when she sleeps)

When she wakes up, there is blood on her hand, under her nails, on the pillow. The back of her neck is scraped raw. 

(There was a disc in the back of her neck and he could control her, take away everything that made her _her_ and turn her into one of his zombies)

Maria holds the pocket mirror up until she can see the wound. It’s a bad one today; the antiseptic lotion is going to sting like a bitch. She’s starting to get scars from the number of times she’s broken the skin.

(She feels like she’s never going to lose him, like he’s still her in head, just waiting for a chance to take her back, to make her one of his drones; it makes Maria was to go back to bed and never, ever get up)

She has a job to do.

This is almost a daily ritual. The damage is always easy to hide; there’s an unwritten rule that, if you work for SHIELD, you never look too closely unless you have to. No one bothers to look and Maria thinks that that should annoy her. Maybe she should care that she’s the acting director of SHIELD and no one has noticed that she still hasn’t managed to shake what the Controller did to her.

Maria thinks that she can probably do it all while asleep by now. The cleaning up and damage control has become as much a part of her as her job. 

(Maria has helped to save the world; she has killed and she has saved and she has vowed to never, _ever_ do some of those things again, to never follow in the footsteps of Nick Fury or a hundred other people who have been too blinded by their own actions to truly see what they’ve done)

_Wake up, check your hands, check your neck, throw away anything that’s badly stained, clean the wound, put a small bandage over it, make sure your uniform covers it, don’t let them see it, don’t let them see it, don’t let them see it—_

Never let them see that they’ve drawn blood.  


**Author's Note:**

> For the prompt 'nightmares' for my Maria Hill Avengers table and 'fear' on my 100_women table.


End file.
